


Catcall

by Kahvi, Roadstergal



Series: Catcall/Understanding Series [1]
Category: Red Dwarf
Genre: Dysfunctional Relationships, First Time, Fuck Or Die, Humor, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-31
Updated: 2012-08-31
Packaged: 2017-11-13 06:17:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 15,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/500414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kahvi/pseuds/Kahvi, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Roadstergal/pseuds/Roadstergal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the crew discover an ancient Felis Sapiens city, Lister's enthusiasm for exploring ends up leaving both him and Rimmer in a tight spot... almost literally. If they want to get out alive, they need to think on their feet. Or at least do something, feet optional.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The city didn’t really have a name, as such. The nearest translation Cat had been able to come up with was “This Place Right Here.” It was a Cat city; the only one they’d found since the one in the cargo hold back on Red Dwarf, and like that city, this one was also abandoned. Frankly, it didn’t look very different at all, despite having been built only fifty years ago - according the readings Kryten had taken. The novelty of exploration soon faded for most of them because, well, there was very little actual novelty around. The houses were identical, small, and dull. There was no public art - and no private art, either. The Cat, to Lister’s astonishment, showed the least interest of all of them, having retreated into the first house he saw for an after-breakfast nap. Oh well, Lister reasoned; maybe curiosity wasn’t considered a good survival trait for Cats?

Lister, however, was enthralled. He was thrilled whenever he recognized something from a picture he had seen in The Book of Cloister, even when it turned out, in fact, to be something completely different in the human and Cat worlds. He whooped when he thought he had managed to read the street-signs correctly, even though there were precious few ways of being certain he’d gotten it right. Rimmer rolled his eyes at Lister’s enthusiasm, but Lister didn’t care. Even though he wished they didn’t think he was their God, he felt somehow vaguely responsible for Catkind. He had tried to learn as much about them as possible, and this was the first time he had been able to really put that knowledge to the test.

It was early evening by the time he found The Room. It looked just like the houses around it, but Lister could smell that the sign above the door stated just that. A house that was called a room. Cats were strange, Lister thought. He took a few steps back, looking at it thoughtfully. The door was open just enough to allow him to peek into the interior. Slowly, a smile crept across his features, and he stepped inside.

“Oi, Rimmer,” he yelled enthusiastically, “come have a look at this!”

One will always find a lot of mirrors around a Cat City; the ones in this city were grimy with abandonment, but Rimmer had nonetheless stopped to check that his iridescent blue uniform was neat, his hair parted correctly, and that his H was on straight. It was a rather silly exercise, to Lister’s way of thinking, since the H was immovably affixed, but he twiddled it from imaginary askew-ness to imaginary straightness with his lean fingers nonetheless.

"What is it, Listy? You've found the communal litter box?"

Lister poked his head back out. “Don't be like that, man! Come on, ye have to see this!”

Rimmer scrunched up his face in annoyance and looked over to the house that was a room. Lister was just barely visible inside the place, his eager chipmunk cheeks pouched over a broad grin. Rimmer cast about for something he could claim was keeping him, and could find nothing. He heaved a great sigh, as if he were being pulled away from something terribly important, which he was not, and walked over to the door. "Fine, what is it?"

Lister stepped back, into the gloom of the unlit room. “Erm... It's over here. You need to get in close, like.” He hoped the hologram wouldn’t see the crossed fingers behind his back.

Rimmer stuck his impressive nose uncertainly into the house that was a room. "Lister, this is a building built by Cats. It's probably held together with bits of twine and saliva. It could come crashing down on your head any second." As his eyes adjusted, he could start to make out Lister’s shape.

“What? Nah, you'd think they'd risk getting mortar all over their latest fashions?” The shape that was resolving itself into Lister patted the wall he was standing beside. “Solid, this!”

Rimmer jumped, pulling his head back out of the room, expecting it to come crashing down. The bloody impulsive goit! "Listy!"

Lister rolled his eyes at Rimmer. What was he expecting; that the house would fall apart at a single poke? This was turning out to be a lot more work than it might be worth in the end, Lister sighed to himself. Oh please, let it be worth it.

Lister’s continuing non-buried-under-ceiling-ness was an unspoken dare. Rimmer grimaced and walked into the house that was a room very, very nervously. He craned his neck upwards, checking the ceiling for signs of failing structural integrity. This meant he was looking in completely the wrong direction to note that the door was swinging rapidly shut behind him. He jumped as it slammed loudly. "Bloody hell!" he squeaked.

As the door slammed shut with a pleasing finality, Lister couldn’t help but jump as well. Losing his balance somewhat, he clung to the nearest thing at hand, which happened to be Rimmer. When he noticed, he let go, feeling the urge to wipe his hands on the legs of his overalls, for some reason. The irate look on Rimmer’s face did not invite intimacy, which didn’t exactly bode well. “Erm…” He looked around in the dimness. There was nothing else to see. No, nothing to _see_... “Let’s go.”

"You know what would have been better than going, Listy?" Rimmer hissed, testily, straightening his uniform from where Lister had creased it. There were disadvantages to corporeality, he groused internally. "Not bloody coming in in the first place! I seem to remember recommending that course of action!"

“‘Yeah... Well... It's an old place, innit,” Lister replied, lamely. “The door probably just… jammed.. or something.” He tried to sound convincing, but knew he wasn’t making a very good job of it. He walked over to the door, and made a perfunctory show of trying to open it. It didn’t budge.

Rimmer looked around the dim room, nervously wondering what might be lurking in the unlit corners. He stood behind Lister with his hands on the other man’s shoulders, trying to conceal the fact that he was as jumpy as hell. "Er, Listy - maybe I should try the door. And you take up the rear, OK?"

Lister felt the light touch of Rimmer’s hands, but shrugged them away. They were distracting, and right now he was in the middle of a performance. “What are you doing, man? I can't move my arms right,” he mumbled.

Rimmer whipped his hands away, then seemed to be confused about what to do with them. He tried to strike a confident pose as he looked around the room, but gave it up and turned back to Lister. Lister pulled at the door, which was hard, given that there was nothing to hold on to. Spitting in his hands, he braced his feet and tried harder, putting his back into it. Spit or not, his hands slipped, and he gave an incoherent curse as he fell back against Rimmer. Rimmer staggered backwards with Lister in his arms.

"Stop gadding about, Lister!"

Lister righted himself and started to dust off his legs. He didn’t really know why, as they were already full of the dust and dirty from the city outside. Just… Something about the situation made him want to clean up. The notion shook him a little. “That didn't seem to work.”

Rimmer lifted his chin and walked to the door, peering at it intently. “Let me have a go at it, Listy. Arnie J is the man for getting a door open. A regular old door-opener I was back in school; the doorman, they called me.”

“Were ya, now?” Lister deadpanned, crossing his arms over his chest. He leaned back against the wall to enjoy the show.

"They said I could get it to swing both ways,” Rimmer said, with pride. Lister made a noise like a dog trying to breathe with its mouth stuck in its food bowl. He banged his head against the wall, and tried to glue his mouth shut with a grin.

“Terribly flattering, but it was only competence." He straightened, narrowing his eyes. "They always giggled when they said that, for some reason." He shook his head and latched his fingers into the crevice between the door and the jamb, yanking back on the door. It stubbornly remained closed.

Lister watched Rimmer fight the closed door. He realized he’d never really noticed the other man’s arms before. Now that he had, he couldn’t take his eyes off them. He knew what they looked like, of course, he’d seen them often enough. Although Rimmer tried his best to avoid other people seeing him in various stages of undress, and even shied from looking at himself in a mirror without at least two layers of clothing, there were always t-shirts and his bicycle kit, and… His mind moved, involuntarily, to the psi-moon. He started to wish he wasn’t wearing loose fitting trousers.

Rimmer stood back and crossed his arms. He could feel a sulk coming on. "What was so bloody special about this room again?"

Lister was still watching those arms moving, only barely conscious that a question had been asked. “Oh... Er... What? Look, maybe we should try something else.”

"Something else? Have a party that brings the house down?" Perish the thought that Lister would have a _useful_ suggestion.

This wasn’t going well, Lister thought. He realized he might not have thought this through all that well. Or rather, he’d forgotten that it was _Rimmer_ he was dealing with here. Which was sort of the point, but then… He looked around restlessly, trying to avoid, in essence, the writing on the wall. “Well, there's... I thought…” He paused, looking around even more desperately.

"You thought?" Rimmer asked, snidely. "I admire that you're branching out, Lister, but is this really the time to try new things?”

“Aha!” It was the most unconvincing ‘aha’ in the history of ‘aha-ing’. And that included Petersen’s drunken impression of Morten Harket at the last ever ship’s karaoke night. “This sign here, yeah?” He pointed at a small square that reeked of something unspeakable. “It's on the wall here, smell it? Right where I'm pointing.”

Rimmer looked to where Lister was pointing. "Sign? I don't sniff Cat." He sighed and gave it a try, his cavernous nostrils slurping up a rather grotty scent. His face twisted. "They all smell the same to me."

Lister nodded, sagely. “Yeah, they kind of do at first.” They didn’t, of course, but he had to do something to keep Rimmer from going into hysterics. Somehow, he didn’t think insulting the other man’s demonstrably laughable foreign language skills would help. “I’ve never seen one inside a house before, though.”

Rimmer stepped back. "I can understand that. They smell vile. Almost as bad as your sock basket."

Lister tried his best to sound offended. That’s it, keep him sparring. “Eh, now!”

Rimmer sighed, annoyed that Lister was privy to information he was not. "Fine, curry-breath, tell me what it says!” He paused, considering. "And please tell me it says, 'Exit'!"

Lister stood on his toes and sniffed at the sign, thus actually reading it carefully for the first time. The thing about Cat writing is that, being made up of smells, it made a bee-line to your brain the way no other writing could. The message hit Lister’s brain like a zero-G footballer scoring a winning touch-up. He reeled. No. This had to be wrong. This had got to be smegging _wrong_! “Well...”

Rimmer stood, tapping his foot, waiting for a sentence to follow the ‘Well.’ A pause meandered up, shagged, sat there pregnant, delivered a little pause, and fled.

“No, “ Lister said, finally. He read it again. And again. Then once more for good measure. Then another time, just in case he’d been wrong the first four times. It stubbornly remained exactly the same.

Rimmer sighed. "Fine. Tell me that it doesn't say, 'Welcome to instant death'."

Lister shook his head, and said, in an oddly quiet voice, “It doesn't say that, either.” Sixth time was not the charm either. All he could think was that Rimmer was going to smegging _kill_ him!

Rimmer nodded. "Brilliant! Now that our possibilities are bracketed..." He trailed off, inviting another pause. He desperately hoped this one would stay celibate.

“It does say something about opening the door, though.” Lister offered. At least that was true. Lucky number seven? He sniffed it again, all his fingers _and_ toes crossed.

Rimmer paced back and forth across the narrow room. His panic at being trapped in a strange, dark Cat room had not ebbed one bit, and Lister’s hedging was only putting him more on edge. He whirled on his boot-tip and glanced at Lister with every pass; the other man continued to sniff intently at the sign. Rimmer did this exactly ten times, then stopped and shouted, "Are you going to tell me, or am I going to have to pull your underwear out through your esophagus?"

Lister looked back at him, images of underpants and entrails filling his mind. “Easy now! This takes time, you know! I'm not exactly the fastest reader in the world, and that's when I've got actual letters to work with. Cat signs are more... Fluid like.” Fluid-like? He mentally slapped himself. What did that even mean?

"Slurp down that sign pronto, Listy," Rimmer growled, continuing to pace. Lister rolled his eyes and sighed as he continued to sniff at the sign. Suddenly, he seemed to relax. Rimmer stopped pacing and stared. “Listy?”

Lister cleared his throat and glanced nervously at Rimmer. It had to be wrong. He’d read it at least two dozen times, but, well, it just had to be wrong, hadn’t it? Yes? Yes. He shook hands with himself, glad to have come to an agreement. “Er.... You absolutely sure you want to know what it says?”

"Lister!!" Rimmer shouted. "Spit it out, you goit!"

“Yer not gonna like it,” Lister warned. This was certainly true, either way.

Rimmer flung his hands open, indicating his pacing area. "As opposed to how much I am just loving standing here waiting for you to tell me how to get the smeg out of here?"

Lister backed away from the sign, towards Rimmer, as though that was somehow going to help. “Well... basically... we have to do something.”

Rimmer raised his hands to Lister’s neck level as the space-bum continued to back towards him. "I hope it's going to be me throttling you. Because I'm just about ready to do that."

Facts first. The safe ones. Lister went into lecture-mode. “Well, in order to get out… there's a sensor up there somewhere,” he pointed to the top of the door, “and that'll pick up our movements, and the proper movement combinations will open the door.”

"And?" Rimmer asked, wishing Lister would stop hedging.

“So we just stand over... well, more or less over there…” he pointed to a spot close to the center of the room in one dimension, and skewed towards the door in the other dimension, ”And we... erm...” his voice moved into deadpan, “Kiss.”

Another tart of a pause came sashaying by and got itself pregnant. The other pause was thrilled and delighted its offspring would now have a playmate.

Rimmer swallowed. "Are you sure it doesn't say 'Welcome to instant death'?"

“I said you wouldn't like it. Why do you think it was taking me that long?”

Rimmer shook his head at the absurdity of it. "I don’t buy it. Why the smeg did Cats make a building with a snog exit?"

“Who knows?? They're Cats!” Lister shouted, frustrated. “They clean their clothes with their own tongues!”

Rimmer backed away from Lister. "My. Clothes. Are. Perfectly. Clean." 

Lister wrinkled his nose in disgust. Rimmer might look appetizing, but his clothes sure didn’t. “I wasn't offering.”

Rimmer bit his lip. "This is ludicrous. Is this the most complicated form of date rape the universe has yet seen?"

“Better than a whack on the head with a winch, eh?” Lister grinned, and immediately wished he hadn’t, as his grin froze. Yeah, good one, Dave, that’ll set the mood right.

Rimmer started to retort, then thought better of getting himself mired in an argument where the facts were solidly against him. He looked up above the door, into the dimness where Lister indicated the sensors would be. Fine. He would play their game, and then find some imaginative way to raze this place to the ground once he was out. He grabbed Lister by the stained collar and hauled him over to the area he had earlier pointed to.

“Hey, easy!” Lister yelped, surprised by the abrupt action, yet rather excited to see where this was going.

Rimmer paid no attention. He leaned down and gave Lister a swift and clinical peck on the cheek. "Fine." He looked towards the door. It mocked him with its inarguable shut-ness.

Lister cleared his throat. “I don't think that worked, ya know,” he reported, unnecessarily.

 

The Cat danced his way through the comfortably narrow streets, sniffing at this, investigating that, and feeling generally disappointed. This place was full of places to sleep, but sadly lacking in food, and there was absolutely nothing to have sex with. This was definitely not getting a thumbs-up in the guidebook. Rounding a corner, he suddenly smelled something awfully familiar. Canine teeth gleamed in the early twilight, and he moved his way towards it, pausing only at half a dozen mirrors to check how he was looking. Sure enough; there it was – a Room. Man, he hadn’t seen one of them since he was a one of those short things that you had to be for a while until you got to be big and handsome. Kid. That was it. A kid.

He paused. There were voices coming from inside. It sounded like… goal-post head and dormouse-cheeks? In a _Room_? He considered this, his face screwed up with disgust for a minute, then shrugged. He never could understand those crazy monkeys anyway. Smelling like they did for one another, and never doing anything about it? Maybe this’d be good for them. He paused again. Their voices seemed agitated. Maybe he should do something. He nodded, agreeing with himself. Yes, he absolutely should. Feeling pleased, he sauntered off to the nearest house for an early-evening snooze.

 

Rimmer worried at his lower lip. "The sensors must be out. Maybe we can hotwire them..." He tried to look at where the sensors should be, reaching up over the door and feeling only wall. He tried a little jump.

“Look, Rimmer...” Lister sighed. “That's not gonna be enough, is it?” His hands flew to the place on his cheek where Rimmer’s lips had touched him, briefly. It didn’t feel any different, which was somehow disappointing.

Rimmer, engrossed in his search for the sensors, missed the gesture. He licked his lips as he studied the door intently. “Why not? It said a kiss. I gave you a kiss, and I hope the Listerine stocks on Starbug are up-to-date." Listerine, he thought; God, why couldn’t it be called something else? He never wanted anything even remotely connected to the man near his mouth. No, indeedy. He pushed that train of thought away, firmly, and embraced his anger and frustration again.

“That's not what it said,” Lister protested, blushing slightly from the truth that was, oddly, also a lie. “They're different words, in Cat.” He stood very still, at the same place to which Rimmer had dragged him, looking vaguely in Rimmer's direction.

Rimmer sighed and turned to face Lister. "I am getting a feeling that I am going to be very nostalgic for the time when I thought the sign said, 'Welcome to instant death'."

“Thanks for the compliment, man!” Lister snorted.

Rimmer gave a quiet moan. He was trapped in a dark room in a deserted Cat city with the messiest slob JMC had ever seen, and now the man was acting hurt at the insinuation that Rimmer might not be falling over himself with eagerness at the prospect of canoodling with him. "What? Did I just unintentionally insult the champion of the first annual Red Dwarf kiss-off?" He snorted. "I realize that you do, technically, kiss better than any other man alive, but the competition is not doing so well these days, is it?"

“I'm just saying, I'd think kissing me'd be better than instant death, yeah? I'm not that repulsive, am I?” Lister couldn’t help the insecurity from seeping into his voice. He hated feeling like that, and with _Rimmer_! It was intolerable. But he just couldn’t help it. He was the king of chat up, the prince of charm, the fascist dictator of pulling, so long as he didn’t actually care about the people he was making a move on. And he did care about the smeghead. That was the trouble. It made him feel like he was a short, fat, ugly goit, and not the suave master of seduction he normally knew himself to be.

Rimmer’s eyes narrowed. "Lister, kissing you after your pick-me-up afternoon lager is probably fairly close." In frustration, he kicked the door with the bottom of his booted foot. When that produced no good effect, he banged his head against the stubborn door. "Smeg."

Lister shook his head. It was no use, was it. He was an idiot; once for dragging Rimmer in here, twice for thinking he’d want to kiss him, three times for being attracted to the bastard in the first place. What was wrong with him? How could he despise and lust after someone at the same time? It was stupid! Resignedly, he walked to the wall near the door and sat down with his back to it. It seemed like they were stuck here, then.

Rimmer tried a more enthusiastic jump at where he knew the sensors should be. He could almost see them, almost touch them… just a little higher. He put his hand on the lintel over the door and jumped higher.

“Give it a rest, man,” Lister said, quietly. “It's not helping.” He was deliberately not looking at Rimmer. He was deliberately not looking at anything.

Rimmer bit his lip. If this… thing didn’t budge with what was, technically, a kiss, then there must be some strange Cattish value judgment built into it, and that thought made him feel like the time when his brothers poured a bottle of millipedes down his shorts. He finally burst out, "Listy, I don't particularly feel like being judged on my kissing ability by some smegging long-dead preening egotistical bloody Cats!"

“It's not a contest or anything... It's just... a kiss. All normal, like.”

"Normal??" Rimmer squeaked.

“Yeah?” Lister smirked internally. People kiss, you know, Rimmer, he thought. Normal people do. People who aren’t anal-retentive gimboids do. That’s how come it’s normal. But you wouldn’t know about that, now, would ya?

Rimmer put his back to the door and held his hands out in front of him. He took a deep breath. "Lister, just answer me one thing. Did the sign specify tongues?"

Liquid fire surged down Lister’s spine. Well. That was unexpected. He blushed, actually blushed (what was he, a seventeen-year-old girl?), thankful for the ill-lit room. For one, daring moment he contemplated saying ‘yes’, but that would be wrong in so many ways. “Not... specifically, no.”

Rimmer grumbled under his breath about cats, their heritage, their dubious sexuality, and a host of other unsubstantiated complaints. He kicked the door again with his toe, with no energy. Finally he turned, and muttered, “Fine.”

“Yeah?” Lister climbed to his feet, feeling altogether more cheerful than he had any right to be.

Rimmer continued to mutter offensive words under his breath. "Just smegging bloody get this stupid bloody goitish goddam thing..." popped out as audible before he trailed off again. He glanced at Lister, then looked down at his boots. He realized he’d forgotten to polish them this morning; there hadn’t been time. Wonderful. He was about to kiss a smug-faced gimboid, and his boots were dull.

Lister grinned and hurried over to the spot, trying not to look too eager, before realizing that was probably far too late. “All right then!”

Rimmer frowned with every part of his body, from his eyebrows to his slumped shoulders to the booted feet that dragged him over to Lister, who merely stood there, waiting stiffly. Rimmer stopped when he was about a hands-breadth from Lister; at which point he suddenly realized he had no idea what to do with his hands. This struck him as very important, for some reason. He knew they were supposed to be involved somehow, but in what way? He lifted them as if to put them on Lister's shoulders, then dropped them. He finally settled for wringing them with each other, which at least kept them busy, but didn’t seem to accomplish much.

Lister didn’t know where to look. Then it struck him it might be a good idea to look up at Rimmer. He tilted his head slightly upwards, and saw Rimmer, his eyes squeezed shut, his face scrunched comically, and his lips pursed, moving towards him, his nose on a collision course with Lister’s. Tilting his head to the side to avoid the Hindenburg, Lister found their lips meeting almost by accident, and felt Rimmer freeze up. Rimmer had been bracing himself for an unpleasant taste, but that sense was not involved, yet. Instead, he felt an unexpectedly pleasing softness press itself to his own lips. Lister opened his mouth involuntarily, and Rimmer let his mouth relax from the purse. The novelty of it!

Lister gently grabbed Rimmer’s upper lip with both of his own, forgetting for one brief moment who he was dealing with. Startled, Rimmer swayed backwards. His hands flailed to balance him in the face of the sudden movement, and he grabbed Lister’s shoulders to steady himself. Lister seemed to awaken from a trance. He broke contact suddenly, shaking his head. Rimmer regained his balance, opened his eyes, and jerked his hands off of Lister. He awkwardly licked his lips, staring at the shorter man, who turned away from Rimmer, his hand on his lips.

Rimmer glanced at the door. "Er..." he swallowed, noting its persistent state of closure, to which Lister seemed completely oblivious. “Lister..."

A mumble came in reply. “Yeah?”

Rimmer gathered up his Rimmerness and took a deep breath. "There seems to be a certain lack of door-opening, squire. Are you sure you didn't misread the sign?"

Lister felt dazed. The door? Something about the door? “Wha?” he asked, bemused. He looked towards the item in question. “Oh. Well. That's odd.”

“Odd,” Rimmer sneered. "Are you sure it didn't say 'juggle' or ‘bake a cake’ or ‘lick your own privates,’ and you mis-smelled it as 'snog'?"

“Yeah, I'm sure.” If only, he thought wearily. And if that, pleasant as it had been, was a snog, then he was Jim Bexley Speed.

Rimmer shook his head. "The sensors _must_ be broken."

“Ye can't break them, Rimmer.”

"Watch me," Rimmer growled.

“Maybe... Maybe we did it wrong?” Lister asked, hesitantly.

"Wrong? We were supposed to be facing away from each other? Some strange Cat-snog, where we sniff each others' rears?"

Lister shrugged. “No… well, you know...” he made gestures to indicate something more. “Maybe it needs something more... intense, like.”

"God,” Rimmer groaned. “It _did_ specify tongues, didn't it."

“Well, not really specify…” Lister said, awkwardly, moving away from the subject of specificity. “But you know... Cats are like that. Don't beat around the bush, they don't.” Perhaps he could pass off his unwillingness to discuss details as shyness, Lister thought desperately. It seemed to work, as Rimmer gave him an odd look.

"Are you sure that's what the sign said?" Lister shrugged. "This is getting a leeeetle tough for me to believe, Listy. A dedicated snog-room? Smooch or die?"

“It said we had to kiss. But Cat kisses might be different from ours, is what I'm saying.” He stood up straight, in an attempt to give the impression of forthrightness and honesty. Honest people always stand up straight, his gran had told him. She’d been 78 and crook-backed at the time, and thinking of that statement sometimes made his head hurt.

Rimmer leaned back against the wall, looked up at the invisible ceiling, and then hit Lister with the best glare he could muster, right in the eyes. "You had to smuggle that bloody cat on board." He snorted. "Couldn't be happy with a fish."

Lister gave him an incredulous look. “What??”

"That's where all this started, you know," Rimmer said, accusingly.

“Fer smeg’s sake, Rimmer!” Lister slapped his forehead. “I wouldn't even be alive if it wasn't for that bloody cat, would I? And you; you wouldn't be here, either!” Rimmer grimaced as he tried to argue with that. He couldn’t. “So what? If I'd have brought a goldfish we might have been under water now! Rimmer - what happened, happened! We can't change that.”

Rimmer sighed. "We’d be swimming in a little plastic castle."

Lister couldn’t stifle a giggle. “You'd look good in one of them diving hats, though.”

"I'd look like a condom."

Lister shrugged. “Nothing wrong with a good-looking condom. We used to go fishing for 'em back home.”

A conversation that moved from the subject of him and Lister snogging to condoms was not making Rimmer comfortable. He cast about for a change of topic. “Well.” He shuffled to the center of the room.

Lister eyed the hologram. Why was he looking so tense? What did it take to put the man at ease? Now he was biting his own lower lip and glancing back at Lister. Lister looked down at his own, biker-gloved hands. They had nothing to add on the subject.

“Well…” Rimmer said. He grumbled under his breath again. He was being judged by a nearly extinct race that had evolved from his grotty bunkmate’s pet cat. A herd of felines that considered Lister to be the height of divinity had decided that he, Arnie J., could not kiss well. His hands started to feel cold and clammy, the way they did before every one of his astronavigation exams. God, don’t tell me I’m about to faint, he moaned internally.

“Yeah?” Lister asked.

"Let's get this smeg over with,” Rimmer growled.

Lister walked over to stand in front of Rimmer, trying not to feel one way or another. “Right.” This is what you got into this for, he reminded himself. He leaned forward, taking charge this time. Rimmer squeezed his eyes shut again and pursed his lips, looking astonishingly dorkish. Lister smiled, and let his lips meet Rimmer’s pursed ones, opening his mouth slightly. Rimmer forced himself to relax to the point where he could unpurse his lips, letting them part, as Lister eased the tip of his tongue out to caress the front of Rimmer’s mouth. The hologram shivered, and parted his clamped teeth. Lister grabbed Rimmer’s arms to steady himself, moving his tongue in past Rimmer’s lips, slowly. Rimmer grabbed Lister’s waist and opened his mouth further, flinching as he tasted the cigarettes that hung on Lister’s breath. Rimmer’s tongue twiddled Lister’s with the same nervous wariness a cat uses to prod at a dead mouse, as his mouth flooded with the tastes of Lister’s indulgences. Lister found he was beginning to forget how to breathe, as he felt control slipping away. He wanted, needed, _more_. If not breathing was the price for that, then, well, so be it. Rimmer focused on correct technique – or what he thought he might have read or heard or seen somewhere was the correct technique – as a distraction from the fact that he had developed a rather insistent erection. Figuring out exactly _where_ he’d read or heard them made itself useful as a further distraction when Lister pulled Rimmer closer and put one hand behind the taller man’s neck. But something very primal in Rimmer responded in a very happy way to this, and he wrapped his own hands around the small of Lister’s back, opening his mouth wider.

Neither of them noticed that the door was still firmly shut.

Rimmer began to lose the capacity for rational thought. He rubbed his groin insistently into Lister's hipbone, only half aware of what he was doing. Lister gasped into Rimmer’s mouth, and Rimmer, with a sharp inhalation, inadvertently sucked Lister’s tongue in deeper, that preternaturally long muscle filling his mouth. Lister began to feel faint, not from Rimmer’s almost painfully tight embrace, but lack of oxygen. He needed air, but desperately did not want to break the kiss to get it. He’d given up on breathing, hadn’t he? He could do it; it was bound to be easier than quitting smoking. He only pulled away when he felt knives in his lungs, and stood there panting. Rimmer stood back, gasping, shocked and surprised. He looked around on the floor, knowing that his composure was scattered around in little pieces. He had a sudden, irrational urge to go look for it and gather it together, like a smashed tea-pot. He licked his lips, tasting cigarette ash with a dusting of curry, and straightened his uniform with trembling hands. Neat. He must appear neat.

Lister stood, swaying. Air flowed mercifully, finally, into his lungs giving his brain the oxygen it needed to make a fatal realization. He turned towards the door. “What?” he cried, in desperation and panic. Smeg no. Oh, no, no, _no!_

Rimmer looked up from where he stood, bent, with his hands on his knees, mentally willing his erection to subside. He suddenly remembered that he was supposed to care about the door.

Lister threw himself at the door, yelling, kicking, almost biting it in rage. “Smegging hell!”

"I think you mis-smelled the sign, Listy,” Rimmer said with resignation. Lister ignored him, attacking the door. “No way! No smegging way! That wasn't the way it was supposed to go!”

Rimmer turned away to face the dark room. "It probably said we were supposed to give a secret knock,” he grumbled. "And your subconscious just turned that into 'snog.'" All of that paranoia for nothing. Maybe the Cats were very impressed with his kissing ability, after all.

Lister poured all his anger, rage and frustration out on the inanimate object, giving it a painful whack with his elbow. “That's not what it said in the book!” he wailed.

Rimmer stood up straight and looked over his shoulder. "Book?" He turned. "Lister, what smegging book?"

Lister stopped. He turned very, very, slowly.

Rimmer found himself back in comfortably familiar territory. Ire at Lister was flooding into him. He pointed at the sign near the door. "Listy. _That_ is a sign. What is this smeg about a book?"

Lister shrugged. Entrails loomed in his mind. “Oh... You know... Some book.” Rimmer’s eyes narrowed.

“Lister, you never read a book in your life."

“I've smelled a few, though... “ Refusing to look defeat in the eyes, Lister hid his head in his hands and slid down the wall.

Rimmer crossed his arms and glared down at Lister. "Sniff anything good lately?"

“This wasn't how it was supposed to go. I'm sorry, man.”

"Not half as sorry as I'm going to be when you explain this to me," Rimmer grated. "And not half as sorry as you're going to be when I figure out what to do with you after you've explained this to me."

“I thought it would be a laugh!” Lister wailed, wondering idly if there would be enough left of him for Kryten to put together again after he’d gone through this.

Rimmer snapped. "WHAT would be a laugh??" he bellowed.

Lister shrugged, lamely. Why had he done it? “Just seeing what is was like. I was... Curious.” Oh yes. He had been. That smegging, eternal curiosity. The Cats had got it right, hadn’t they? Curiosity only got you into deep smeg. Rimmer still stood, glaring, waiting for the punchline, and Lister, in a quiet voice, gave it to him. “Kissing ya.” He quickly hurried to the next sentence, as if it would erase the last one. “And then I remembered there was this book I'd read, where they'd said there was this room, right, that they'd made, right, for a laugh, yeah?”

Rimmer was almost shellshocked. He licked his lips, and his mouth worked, but nothing sensible came out.

Lister was speaking even more quickly. “And they'd get people in there, and they'd have to kiss to get out, you know, like you'd do when you were at a party when you were a teenager?”

Rimmer was quickly progressing from shock to seethe. His voice hit its nasal, high-pitched peak of indignation. "You wanted to know what it was LIKE... to kiss me? So you locked me in a room where I _had_ to snog you to get out? Only it doesn't work?"

Lister looked slightly pale. Well. When he put it like that... “Erm... Sort of.”

"Couldn't you have done something a little classier and more subtle? Gotten me drunk? Slipped drugs into my tea?" Rimmer felt oddly, ridiculously violated.

“Look, I'm an impulsive guy, aren't I? It wasn't like I'd planned on finding this place or anything... But when we were here, and I saw it...” Lister glanced at the sign on the wall and swallowed.

Rimmer gritted his teeth and continued to glare at Lister in disbelief. "You just decided, 'what the smeg, I'll try to trap a superior officer into a snog'."

Lister raised an eyebrow. “'Superior officer’?”

"I'm a second technician, Lister! You're a third technician! That makes me your superior officer! As per Space Corps Directive 6798433, a superior officer caught in a liaison with a subordinate is subject to penalties including, but not limited to, loss of vacation time and punitive ship-painting shifts!"

Lister’s eyebrows reached for the sky.

"You really need to think your actions through, Lister!" Rimmer was consciously ignoring Space Corps Directive 907632/c, which directly addresses the case of a male subordinate intentionally giving a male superior an erection. That would just make everything too complicated, he reasoned. Besides, where would they get the fishing line?

“So wait - you're objecting to me kissing you on the grounds that yer a superior officer?”

"Lister, these things matter!" The blighter really couldn’t see beyond his own penis, could he? God, he thought, paranoia flaring up irrationally; was it _that_ large?

“Yeah, to YOU, they matter! No one else cares, Rimmer!“

"A sense of discipline and order is the only thing we've got, Lister!" Rimmer was almost shouting, now.

“Yeah?” Lister rose from his seated position, anger filling him.

"Yes!"

“What about friendship, eh?”

"Er..." This was a complete tangent. It had nothing to do with Space Corps directives. Rimmer floundered, still seething.

“What about working together as a team? Supporting one another? What about actually smegging caring about yer crewmates, eh, RIMMer?” He spat the name out in full lavatory disinfectant mode.

He knows, Rimmer thought. He _knows_ that’s the wrong way to pronounce my name. That added insult plucked Rimmer’s taut nerves into a harmonic chord of fury.

"Since when does caring about someone get you anywhere?” he shouted. "Anywhere but dead, on a dingy goddam landing vehicle, running after the dingy goddam ship that, in all of its grottiness, is still a better option than the rust-bucket you're on? With three layabout crewmates who can't stand the sight of you?" He was spitting, now, nearly frothing at the mouth in fury. "And wishing you had done any of a thousand things differently so that you WOULDN'T BE HERE?" Rimmer took a deep breath, and almost choked on it.

‘Can’t stand the sight of you,’ Lister thought. Have you seen yerself, man? When yer like this, so angry you forget to hunch over and look miserable, you take my breath away. Yeah, I can’t stand the sight of ya. But not in the way you think… He bit his lip and scratched his head, moving a little closer to where Rimmer stood, panting and clenching and unclenching his fists. “Eh, now,” he said, softly.

"What?" Rimmer growled, feeling slightly drained and slightly ludicrous after his outburst. "What now? If we shout at each other long enough, will the door open?"

“I do care... about ya, man,” Lister said, self-consciously.

"You care that I remain mobile enough to walk out of the room once in a while and leave you on your smegging own."

Lister raised his head to look Rimmer straight in the eyes. “I care. About _you_.”

Rimmer swallowed uncomfortably. The rug had been pulled from under his righteous ire far too many times for one day.

“I know I don't show it as much as I should, and I know I can be a bastard sometimes... But man, so can you. But I care. You need to know that.” There was more. But that would have to do… For now. Things were moving way too fast - but whose fault was that but his own?

Rimmer shuddered a deep breath out. Still clenching and unclenching fists, he looked at his boots. He couldn’t look at Lister and stay angry. He would look at those treacherous lying brown eyes and either laugh or cry, and he could not afford to do either.

Lister moved even closer, a careful smile on his lips, daring Rimmer to look up. It took a surprising amount of effort for Rimmer to lift his head. A tired frown was inspecting his face and considering settling in for the long haul. "It's my job to be a bastard, Lister. I'm good at it. God knows I'm not good at much else."

“Look, I'm sorry I brought you here. That wasn't fair. Was a silly thing to do. But hey, I'm a silly guy, yeah?”

"Silly isn't the first word that springs to mind," Rimmer said, grasping at the lifeline of his familiar snark.

“Yeah, yer a right bastard, Rimmer.” But Lister was grinning. “The best I've ever known!”

Rimmer smiled wanly back. "And you're the silliest goit I've ever known."

“There ya are then!” Lister’s grin grew wider. “There's the two of us; and all the better for it.”

"That's all very comforting. Meanwhile, we are still stuck in your little feline kisstrap."

Lister’s face fell. “Yeah... There's that.” And they’d been doing so well.

Rimmer kicked the door again, not expecting it to do anything useful. He was not disappointed. The door gave a hollow thud and did not move.

Lister took off his leather deerstalker and started to twist it nervously in his hands. The hat, like his hands earlier, refused to comment on the situation.

That nervous gesture started Rimmer off, and he tapped absently at the small keypad that dangled from his belt and sat against his right thigh. He accidentally hit a button, and his uniform shimmered and turned iridescent purple. He frowned, tapped the button next to it, and was relieved to see his uniform change back to blue.

“Um... Rimmer?”

"Yes?" Rimmer replied, testily.

“Did you know you could do that?”

"I'm still figuring this hard-light body out," he grumbled. “It’s nothing like my soft-light body.”

“Oh.” That purple had looked damn good. He mentally whacked his libido with a stick. “Seems to work all right though... Eh?” He regretted the words as soon as they were out of his mouth. What was he today, Captain Foot-in-Mouth?

"What, my body?" Rimmer asked.

“I mean... You... That is...” He gestured lamely, dropping his hat on the floor, and scratched the back of his ear.

All possible implications of the question hit Rimmer, and he furrowed his brow and coughed. He did not want the subject of conversation to be his body. Especially since he was so new to it, and did not, in fact, know if it worked ‘all right’ for anything more daring than walking and pushing buttons. He had written ‘chewing gum simultaneously’ into his planner for a month from now.

“Never mind.” Lister decided to read the sign again, wishing he were religious so he could have prayed for a miracle.

Rimmer turned and leaned against the wall, his arm up, his head in the crook of his elbow. Lister stood with his back to Rimmer, studying the sign. He seemed unable to stay still, and his dancing from foot to foot flitted at the edges of Rimmer’s peripheral vision. "Smeg," the hologram groaned, pounding on the wall. He had snogged the grottiest bum it had ever been his misfortune to encounter, just to escape this room, and it had not worked. Worst of all, he had actually enjoyed it. Lord help him.

Rimmer heard Lister mumble something under breath. "What?" he asked.

“Nothing,” Lister replied, trying to delay the inevitable. The sign had not changed. He would have to ‘fess up.

A muffled "What is it?" escaped from underneath the iridescent padding of Rimmer’s arm.

Lister closed his eyes, clenching his fists. “If I tell ya... you'll kill me.”

Rimmer raised his head from his arm. "Lister, if you _don't_ tell me, I'll kill you."

Lister laughed nervously. Some fine mess this was, eh? He swallowed, and turned to face Rimmer. “I didn't read the sign wrong earlier. But I didn't tell you what it actually said.”

"Lister, you bloody git," Rimmer groaned at the wall. "Tell me what the blasted sign says."

“See, it's supposed to be that you open the door by kissing. Just kissing, yeah? That's what the book said!” Stupid, bloody book. The pictures had been nice, though.

"You told me that."

“So when I read the sign, I knew it had to be wrong. It just had to be.”

"I actually have to break the sign over your head? I'm ready and willing." That’s what you think, Lister thought.

“But then we did kiss, proper, like, so that's when I knew...”

Rimmer wondered if he were actually blushing. He grabbed onto his growing anger to push away the embarrassment. "Knew _what_?"

“God, man, don't make me _say_ it!” Lister said, pleading. His voice was approaching falsetto.

"Say _what_?" Rimmer spun around, frustrated. "Oh, no, communicate it without _saying_ it. Act it out! Play charades! Do an interpretive dance! Make it a haiku!" He was bellowing, now, and Lister had to yell even louder to be heard over him.

“IT SAYS WE HAVE TO SMEGGING SHAG, RIMMER! IT WANTS US TO SHAG!” 


	2. Chapter 2

Somewhere in an abandoned Cat city, on a planetoid the universe had sensibly forgotten about, two men stood, very still, in a very small house that was called a Room. The words "IT SAYS WE HAVE TO SMEGGING SHAG!" echoed across the room and through their skulls.

Lister staggered back with the effort of shouting, almost stepping on his hat.

Rimmer hiccupped, took a few steps back, and coughed. “What?” he asked, in a squeak.

Lister put his hat back on, holding it tight to his head with both hands. In a tiny voice, he said, “Oh god, don't make me say it again....”

"And we,” Rimmer’s voice squeaked again, “shag, and the door doesn't open?"

Lister replied in that same tiny voice “I don't know...”

Rimmer gulped and looked down. “I’ve done more in one day than I did in a lifetime, Lister." For smeg’s sake. How much soul-baring does a dead man have to do to get out of one simple bloody room?

Lister gritted his teeth. “I'm sorry.”

This was not the worst of it, though, and Rimmer did not know how to express the worst of it. Willingness was only part of the equation. How on earth was he supposed to tell _Lister_ … "I mean, does it say…” He started again. “Lister, just what..." He stuttered to a halt again, waving his hands incoherently. He abruptly stammered to a halt, and sat heavily with his back against the wall. “Smeg.” He just could not say it. No chance.

Lister’s expression slowly changed as he watched this performance. A smile danced in his eyes, and at the corners of his mouth. “It doesn't say anything specific. Just ‘meeoaarrrouuaaaurgh.’” The word made his throat hurt. “Er, sex.”

"Sex."

“Sex.”

"I, er..." Rimmer waved his hands again. “Lister, I...” He circled one hand, then waved it back and forth between them. “I don’t know…” he choked and stopped.

Lister looked at Rimmer’s hands, trying to figure out what on Earth he meant. He walked over, knelt down, and looked into Rimmer’s face as the hologram licked his lips. “Hey, listen,” he said. “You don't _have_ to do anything, right?”

"Yes! I can just rot in here for the rest of eternity!" Rimmer could feel that he was getting hysterical.

“We'll get out of here! We'll find a way, yeah?”

"I can make go boards out of rotted wood chunks! I can learn to juggle!"

“Yer getting hysterical.”

"YOU THINK SO??" Rimmer shouted. He hugged his knees and took a deep breath. He mumbled something into them.

“OK... OK... We'll find a way out of this. Gotta be another way out of this. Look, I'm sure the Cat and Kryten are out there trying to help right now!” He tried to catch Rimmer’s eye through the other man’s knees.

Rimmer poked his head up. "I'm sure they're reading the 'Screw to exit' sign on the outside and laughing hysterically."

“It's not on the outside; it just says "Room" there. That's what they call this place,” Lister said, hoping he hadn’t misunderstood that part too.

 

Kryten looked down at the sleeping form of Cat, curled up cozily inside the impossibly narrow space that was clearly supposed to be a bedroom. “Wake up,” he yelled again, expecting, and getting, no reaction. Oh, it was no use. His olfactory senses weren’t what they used to be since Lister had repaired him after the psi-moon accident, and he found it hard to navigate around the confusing city. He kept confusing grape and cheese, and no matter how hard he tried he just couldn’t get the hang of pine. He needed the feline’s nose. Apparently there was nothing for it but to wait until he woke up. Outside, across the slinking road, a sign wafted “Room” softly out into the cold night air.

 

"It's probably common knowledge among the Cats,” Rimmer groused. “'Room, eh?' Titter..."

“He might not know,” Lister offered, sounding unconvinced himself.

"And GELFs might fly."

“Some might. You know those chicken-beetroots we saw that time?”

"They must have weighed 30 stone. Their wings were as useful as tits on a bull."

“Wasn't for lack of trying though!” Mental images he’d tried very hard to forget rose in Lister’s mind.

"The GELFs or the bulls?"

Lister shook his head. “We gotta keep our hopes up, is what I'm saying.” Visions of bulls with tits swam in his mind, and he found his eyes drawn to the front of Rimmer’s uniform. He remembered the psi-moon again.

Rimmer shivered, although it was almost too warm in the room. "If you want to find mine, start digging."

“What, yer tits?” Lister asked, staring at Rimmer's chest.

"My hopes, you goit!" Rimmer’s ears turned red.

“Oh, right.” Lister cast about for something, anything un-maudlin to talk about. ”Cats have six nipples, did you know?”

"Yes, and I had been trying to forget ever since I learned."

“I mean, they'd probably only get confused if they saw us naked.”

Rimmer shuddered at the mental images that swam unbidden into his mind, of being strapped naked to an exam table and having Cat examine him with a clipboard and a cold measuring tape. "Cat would get confused if he saw a girl-Cat naked. He probably thinks they're just like him, only not as pretty."

Lister sniggered. “He would, at that.” Rimmer shifted uncomfortably, feeling Lister’s scrutiny. “You looked good in purple, you know,” Lister continued.

Rimmer could not keep track of the conversational leaps. "What?"

“Well, you did.”

"That's nice." Rimmer remained utterly lost.

“Sorry...” Lister sighed. “I don't know what I'm saying. I get like this when I'm nervous.” He looked around. “Not that I'm nervous about us not getting out.” He’d done it _again_. Captain Foot-in-Mouth to the rescue!

Rimmer hugged his knees closer. His mind was cycling through two equally horrifying possibilities. Being locked into a small room for centuries until it fell apart through natural erosion, or getting naked in front of and demonstrating his complete ignorance of all but the most basic of sex to… _Lister_. Rimmer abruptly leapt to his feet and ran at the door full-tilt. Lister rocked back and turned to look in horror. “RIMMER!” he shouted, as Rimmer hit the door shoulder-first at speed and bounced back with a noise like bazookoid shot. The hologram staggered and fell back onto his rear. Lister rushed over to him. “You smegging idiot!”

"Ow," Rimmer whined, plaintively.

Lister glanced at the door. “You didn't even dent it.”

"I did too dent it!" Rimmer replied, prodding his shoulder tenderly. “Maybe broke it.”

“Don't go _doing_ stuff like that!” Lister shouted, looking at where Rimmer sat, nursing his hurt shoulder; he felt like hell. He started to hit his arm with his own fist, as realization struck. “This is _my_ doing! God, I’m such a goit!”

"Just wanted a snog," Rimmer muttered. "You could have asked."

“And now you've gone and...” Lister paused. “What?”

"Nothing." Rimmer prodded his shoulder again with a quiet “Ouch.” But his last statement had Lister’s full attention.

“I could have _asked_?” Yeah, that would have gone down well, he thought. ‘Oi, excuse me, Rimmer, but I’ve been secretly lusting after ya for the last few years; d’you mind if I put me tongue down yer throat?’ Still… There had been something in the way the hologram had said it…

Rimmer looked back at the door. "We need to get the bloody door open, Lister." He decided that the door could be the bane of his existence. It could bear the responsibility for everything that had happened since they had become trapped in this room. He got to his feet, still gently kneading his sore shoulder, looking death at the door. He swallowed. "Lister," he growled.

“Yeah,” Lister replied, quietly, looking at Rimmer with a depth in his eyes that Rimmer just could not take. "Figure out a way to get that door open!” he snapped, desperately. "That's an order!"

“I'm trying, man.” Lister smiled, softly, and, as an afterthought made an attempt at procedure with his salute. “Sir, yes sir!” He figured if Rimmer had ever earned a break and half an ounce of respect, it was now. He busied himself trying to look busy.

Rimmer deflated slightly. Where was the Lister who argued with everything he said? He was hoping to engender more conflict. He could deal with conflict. It was safe, familiar. He walked around the perimeter of the room, prodding at the joins in the corners and at the floor. “Solid,” he groused. "The one thing in all of Cat history that was erected with some care, and we're in it."

Lister kicked randomly at the wall nearest him. “Figures it would be this, yeah?” Kicking at things felt slightly more productive than just looking at them. He kicked at the floor. It didn’t give, and his foot started to throb.

Rimmer watched this with annoyance. "I have an idea,” he said with false excitement. “Let's whack body parts against the inside until we're both one large bruise."

Lister made a noise that was half groan, half giggle. “Yeah, that's a grand idea, that is. But I’d rather...” He remembered Rimmer's earlier reaction to the mention of sex, and shut up abruptly.

Rimmer looked back at him. "What?" He walked over to where Lister was standing. "Rather what?"

“Er... I don't want to... You weren't so hot about the idea earlier!”

"You think we should shag,” Rimmer said, in an emotionless voice. "And see if the door opens." He swallowed and looked at Lister's feet.

“I...” Lister felt lost. “I don't want you to hurt yourself. And yeah, I wouldn't mind... That.”

Rimmer tried to force through what he had not been able to get out before, like drain cleaner attempting to plow through a stubborn clog. His ears were burning. "I..." He swallowed, and looked at Lister, who was playing with his dreds. "I don't know..." His voice was starting to come out as a squeak. He shoved it all out, in one splat of a sentence, in a barely audible squeak. "Idon'tknowhow."

“You don't know what?” Lister asked, genuinely bemused. What Rimmer was trying to tell him was so far outside the realm of what he would consider possible that his mind wouldn’t translate it. “You don't know how to what?”

Rimmer regretted having said it at all. Maybe rotting for a few centuries was a better alternative. He abruptly swung around and started to wrench at the door again. "Blasted thing."

Lister put his hand on Rimmer’s arm, feather-light. “Hey, I was worried you were gonna throw yerself at it again. Don't go doing that.”

Rimmer pounded on the door, then put his face close to the join and bellowed, "You plaster-cast gimp! You fatuous feline!"

“Rimmer... Arn...” Lister said, anxiously. He’d never seen Rimmer this despairing before.

"Get us the smeg out of here!"

Lister moved behind Rimmer, grabbed his arms, and held tight. “Rimmer... It’s OK. It will be OK.”

Rimmer struggled, pulling his arms out of Lister’s grasp. "What is the definition of 'OK,' in the Lister Unabridged?"

“I'm not letting us rot in here, not now, right?” He held his hands just outside Rimmer’s arms, as though he were trying to find a way to touch them without actually touching them.

"Well, it will take a while to rot, true."

“Just trust me; we will fix this. We'll get through this.” He tried to turn Rimmer around to face him.

Rimmer resisted for a minute, trying to glare a hole in the door. He finally gave in and turned, grudgingly, to face Lister.

“Look at me, eh?” Lister said, quietly, but forcefully, his hands on Rimmer’s arms. “Look into my eyes. Focus.”

Rimmer was looking down. He flicked his eyes up.

“Remember how I said I cared about ya?” Rimmer mumbled something that sounded vaguely affirmative. “Yer not stupid, that I know. Look into my eyes, and see that I'm not lying.”

"You're a good liar," Rimmer said, lamely. "You've done it before." He pulled away and leaned back against the door. "I learned a little something about trusting you on the psi-moon."

There was that moon again. “Too right,” Lister nodded. ”I'm not proud of that moment; it's stuck with me since then.” Nightmares. Rimmer’s face looking to him, trusting him, actually smiling; then falling into the newly dug grave marked “Hope.”

Rimmer’s upper lip twisted, and his lower protruded in disdain.

“I was too annoyed with ya to feel anything else, at the time,” Lister continued. “But I did care, and I felt like shit when it was over. And the look on your face when you realized…” Open graves, confused, hurt yells of pain. “Yeah, you've every right not to trust me now. But I want to tell you this all the same.” Lister let go and looked away. Rimmer licked his lips, and was startled to find that they still tasted faintly of cigarettes and cheap beer.

Lister looked back at Rimmer. “But when I kissed you just then... I wasn't lying then either. And that wasn't words doin' the talkin'.”

Rimmer looked away. He put both hands on the door, pushing himself off of it so that he was standing straight. He needed to step back onto familiar ground. "My..." he swallowed. "My shoulder hurts."

“Can I see?” Lister asked, concerned.

Rimmer looked awkwardly down at his shoulder, well-covered with his shirt and jacket. "I haven't tried to take this off since I got the hard-light drive." He hadn’t wanted to. His uniform was his shield.

“You haven't?” Lister asked with considerable surprise.

"Well, it's all so new," Rimmer replied. “I don’t know how everything works. I’m still learning how to control it.” He didn’t want to take off his jacket or boots or, god help him, anything more, and then discover that he couldn’t get any of it back again. It chafed to sleep fully clothed, but he had not had the courage to experiment with doing it any other way.

Lister, having only been a hologram for what amounted to a fraction of the time that Rimmer had, realized that he had no idea what it's really like to be full time living dead person. Still, how could Rimmer _not know_? As a man driven almost entirely by curiosity and impulse, Lister just couldn’t wrap his mind around the idea that someone could have a new body – entirely new, mind – for days without stripping naked at least once and poking all the bits to see how they worked. Hang on… his mind reeled at the implications of this. Rimmer hadn’t seen himself naked?

Rimmer looked at Lister’s distracted stare, wondering where the goit’s thoughts were going. He touched on possible areas of mockery concerning his body, and decided that was not a good line of speculation. He retreated to the safe topic of his sore shoulder, and started to fumble with the clasps on his jacket. Lister considered briefly whether it would be a good idea or not to help the hologram out. He reached out, tentatively; Rimmer did not stop him. He touched a clasp, and frowned. “How does this thing come off, anyway?”

"How should I know?" asked Rimmer.

“It's worse than a Marks and Spencer discount bra!” Lister groused.

Rimmer yanked at the top clasp more firmly. It popped open. Lister grinned. Yanking was his territory; he easily popped open the rest of the clasps, with almost childish glee. Rimmer shrugged out of the jacket, held it out, and tried to set it on the ground; it fizzled to nothingness in a pretty little display of bluish-white light. He shivered at the thought that it might be gone for good. “Well, that answers that.”

“There you are then!” Lister grinned.

Rimmer awkwardly pulled at the neck of the shirt he wore underneath the jacket, trying to expose his shoulder without removing the shirt. Lister frowned, wondering if Rimmer was actually being serious. “I don't think that's going to work, really.” He unthinkingly pulled at Rimmer’s shirt, and it came un-tucked. Rimmer glanced down, uncertainly. Lister raised his eyebrows, and Rimmer made his decision, taking his shirt by the hem and pulling it off. They both watched it dissolve in a little light show.

Lister gawked at Rimmer’s bare torso. Rimmer, however, bit his lip and started to wring his hands in each other. “Er – I don't know how to bring them back." Why would you want to, Lister couldn’t help but think, giving his libido another thwack with the stick. Rimmer sighed and put his kit below ‘trapped in a dark room’ and ‘painful shoulder’ on his list of things to worry about. He looked at his shoulder, where a good-sized purplish bruise was spreading, and winced. “Legion was a lying bastard.”

“You can borrow my jacket,” Lister offered. Then he noticed the bruise. “Ouch! That's a hefty one.”

"Not much to do about it. Maybe one of these is the bruise-remover." He waved at the console on his belt. It probably also controlled his clothes. He was going to have to experiment with it some time, but quailed at the thought of what else it might do.

“It'll heal though... Right?” Worry seeped into Lister’s voice. “Kryten couldn't knock you out, could he?”

Rimmer grimaced. "He _tried_."

“It might turn ya purple,” Lister giggled, waving at the keypad.

"I already am. There, at least."

“Good point. It should be broken, by all rights though.” Lister gave the bruise a critical look. “The fact that it isn't; well, that should mean this'll heal quick, yeah? Does it hurt to touch?”

"I don't know..." Rimmer prodded it. "Sort of."

I’m only doing this to see how bad it is, Lister told himself, as he absent-mindedly traced a path to Rimmer’s shoulder with his hand. The fact that he was caressing Rimmer’s arm on the way up there was just coincidental.

Rimmer shivered. He was not used to being touched - not when alive, and certainly being a hologram got him out of the habit. The mere fact that he was being touched on a part of the body he usually covered thickly with clothes felt ludicrously provocative.

Lister’s hand reached Rimmer’s shoulder, and his touch became clinical. “Does that hurt, then?”

Every brain cell of Rimmer’s was on blue alert, watching and, dear god, _feeling_ Lister’s hand moving up his bare simulated flesh. No brain cells remained free to translate Lister’s comment. "What?" Rimmer stared at Lister’s hand, blinking.

“I'm not hurting you, am I?” Lister asked, earnestly.

"You... what? Er.. no?"

Lister touched Rimmer’s purple shoulder experimentally. “I think you'll be fine.” He felt Rimmer’s tremors. “Er. Are you cold?” He started to shrug out of his leather jacket.

"No." Rimmer was not shaking from the cold. He hugged himself. “I’m just not used to…” he looked down at his shirtlessness. Nudity – not something a soft-light hologram usually has to worry about.

Lister looked at Rimmer’s shirtlessness, too; appreciation and something that looked suspiciously like lust shone in his eyes. “Not that I'd want to cover that up, but...” He proffered his jacket.

There were no theme parks on Io – no room for such frivolity on an outpost moon – so Rimmer had only been to one, on Mimas, as an adult. He had bought a ticket to a rollercoaster, and the whole time that it had slowly ratcheted upwards, he had an ice-cold feeling in the pit of his stomach, not sure if he would be able to take it. An oddly similar cold feeling was growing in him at this moment.

He looked at the thing in Lister’s outstretched hand. Calling it a jacket would not so much be inaccurate, as an insult to jacket-kind. Most of it seemed to be connected to the other bits with string or staples, and there was only one arm. Nevertheless, Rimmer took it. Lister seemed pleased. Rimmer held it at arms’ length, as if it was an alien artifact and he had been asked to determine its purpose.

“Ye can either put it on or not.” Lister shrugged, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

Put it on. What a concept. Rimmer slung it uneasily over his shoulders, and sniffed at it, not sure if he was more worried about the smells he could identify or the ones he could not. He did feel safer once he had… whatever it was on.

“How's that?” Lister asked. Hey now. There’s a sight. The smeghead don’t look half-bad in your jacket, does he, part of Lister said. The other part of him waved a stick, menacingly.

"Er..." Rimmer struggled for an adjective. "Jackety." He hugged himself under the garment.

“You sure yer not cold?” Lister had the insistent feeling that he was missing something, but he couldn’t for the life of him figure out what.

"No."

Lister considered asking for clarification, but seeing the desperate look in Rimmer's eyes, he merely sighed and tried to think of something relaxing. Rimmer, true to form, came up with exactly the opposite.

"I wonder if they've left. It must have been an hour ago that we ducked in here."

“Maybe,” Lister shrugged. In a heroic struggle, his libido yanked the stick away from the sensible part of him (which was, admittedly, the weaker half), beat it senseless, and made Lister put his hand firmly on Rimmer’s hip. He watched the hologram carefully, ready to remove it.

Rimmer shivered, very slightly, but did not pull away. He was afraid his spine had turned to jelly, and would collapse if he moved.

Lister put his other hand on Rimmer’s other hip, feeling like a scientist conducting an experiment with highly sensitive radioactive materials.

Rimmer was still hugging himself under Lister's jacket, uncomfortable with how the other man was staring at his naked torso, as if it were a specimen in a jar. The rollercoaster had finished its slow ratchet to the top, and he was now staring at a very long drop.

“Hey,” Lister said, looking up at Rimmer, feeling he should say something. “I'm a nice guy, really. I aim to prove that to ya.”

"What?" Rimmer asked, barely audible.

“I get that you maybe can't trust me all the way... But can ya trust my body?”

"What?" Rimmer repeated, completely lost. Lister moved his hands slowly around Rimmer's back so that they connected behind the hologram. Rimmer had no idea of how the physical logistics of this were going to play out. He shivered again, pulling Lister’s so-called jacket more tightly around him as the other man drew himself closer.

“What I mean is... Sometimes it's easier to understand one another when there are no words. So with that, I'm going to shut up now. “ He took a deep breath.

Rimmer grasped lamely at the last vestiges of his bravado. "Best idea yet, Listy.” His voice was a hoarse croak. Lister only grinned, so broadly that his teeth parted. Rimmer could swear he saw the tip of his tongue. He was hypnotized by the proximity of those lips. As Lister leaned in for a kiss, Rimmer gamely pursed his lips again, leaning forward and closing his eyes. Lister kept his eyes wide open, and did not move slowly. Sense was not in the driver’s seat anymore, and his libido had been doing the equivalent of drinking heavily all day. His tongue worked into Rimmer’s mouth, forcing the other man to relax his lips. Lister let his tongue slide over Rimmer's teeth and into his mouth, feeling around as though he were trying to coax the real Arn out.

Rimmer was now in the fast plunge of the rollercoaster, not knowing where this was going, not knowing if he was capable of riding it out to the end. He let go of himself and grabbed Lister under the arms like a lifeline. The jacket-thing fell to the ground. The air between his torso and Dave felt very cold, suddenly.

Lister wished he was wearing anything but those stupid smegging overalls; god knows when he's washed them last! He didn’t normally care about these things, but then again, he didn’t normally snog Arnold Judas Rimmer, either! This felt so good, though... Better than... Better than anything. Maybe it's that he had not been this close to sex since forever, but he was more turned on than he had been in his life. Lister tore at his own clothes, zippers breaking, buttons flying, but he did not care.

Rimmer’s mouth was filled with the cigarette-and-curry taste that he had, that day, come to assimilate as Lister. His nostrils were saturated with the mustiness of the place they were trapped in, and he was desperate to replace that with something, anything else. He pulled his head back and pushed it into the join of Lister's neck, sucking and licking, desperately breathing in old ship's air and grease and bitter beer - all of the things, he realized, that had started to represent home, god help him. He searched his memory desperately for comparisons, some guide to how to handle this. McGruder had been almost embarrassing in its rapidity, and the details were not recalled easily. Nirvanah had been divine, almost effortless; and compared to that, this was so earthy, so ship-bound - so _tangible_.

Yelping both at the sudden loss of tongue against tongue, and the new sensations on his neck, Lister forgot undressing, and embraced Rimmer again. The hologram felt so impossibly real; so human.

Rimmer slid his hands under the overalls, trying to find skin, wanting more of this newfound tactile sensation. Lister pushed his mouth over Rimmer's ear, and moaned, quietly, "Arn". This undid Rimmer. He pulled back and kissed Lister fiercely, twisting the frustrating cloth in his fists. Most of Lister's overalls were on the floor, his long johns more tattered than they were at the outset – implausible as that may seem to anyone who had seen them at the outset. Rimmer tried to open his mouth impossibly wide, to swallow Lister whole.

By twisting and moving, Lister guided Rimmer's fumbling hands to an opening into bare skin. Rimmer grasped at Lister’s bare skin like a drowning man thrown a rope. He ran his hand up Lister's bare back. Lister had never imagined that Rimmer could be so... intense. It drove him wild.

The hard-light drive was capable of simulating a very realistically painful erection, Rimmer discovered. And he choked, for a moment, realizing again that he had not the faintest idea what to do with it. He shivered and froze.

Breaking from the kiss oh-so-reluctantly, Lister stepped out of the remains of his overalls, and managed to take the top of his long johns off. Rimmer gasped, feeling naked without Lister pressed to his front. He wrapped his arms around himself again, biting his lower lip as his shivers turned to wracking shudders.

Lister stood there for a moment, panting. His boots were still on. Somehow, they felt like the final lifeline to sanity. He felt on fire, all of him, from his fingertips down into those safe, sturdy boots, but he could not bring himself to move. He watched Rimmer stare back at him with his own arms wrapped around himself, as if he would shatter if he let go, and his mind was a complete blank.

Rimmer looked at Lister as the other man stood almost naked, and was startled at the smoothness of his chest, almost hairless. His brain grasped that observation and refused to move any farther.

Lister looked over, confused. Why was Rimmer looking at him like that? Uncertainty flowed through his haze of lust. There had been times, in their most heated shouting matches over the years, that he had called Lister fat. And those times, Lister had retorted with comments about Rimmer’s nose, and its noticeable lack of aesthetic qualities. Of course, at that time Lister hadn’t been half naked, with a raging erection, half crazed with lust. For smeg’s sake, what was he staring at?!

Rimmer reached out one hand, holding all the more tightly to himself with the other, as Lister stepped forward and held out his own hand. Their hands touched, oddly, as in a dream. Lister wanted to pull the other man to him, but looked at those arms and thought that there was no earthly way he could manage. Then he realized that they were not on Earth, and he pulled, gently. Rimmer, feeling like he was balanced on a pinpoint, staggered forward.

When they met, chest against chest, skin against skin, Lister felt like he was coming home. Rimmer didn’t smell of anything much, but there was the hint of stale air, Lister’s own scent, from their earlier embrace. There should be soap, Lister felt. Soap, and the cheap after-shave that stank up their quarters. His brain made him smell them anyway, and he smiled.

The feeling of that much bare flesh on his own, for the first time in... he didn't want to think about it… made Rimmer even more painfully hard. He felt an ache that started at his groin and spread rapidly upwards, and slowly downwards, making his legs weak.

Lister had stopped thinking. He did not want to - certainly not when he felt – oh, god – felt Rimmer's erection so close to his own.

Rimmer's fingers shook as he grasped Lister's back with one hand and shoulder with the other, hanging on like he would fall otherwise. His lips hovered over Lister's, wanting, not certain that he was allowed. Lister lunged for Rimmer's lips hungrily, like a man dying of thirst. But lips were no longer enough, and he moved lower down, his tongue lashing Rimmer's chin, then his neck, then his good shoulder, moving down his chest.

Rimmer shuddered, feeling his legs start to buckle. Lister’s knees gave in, as well, as he moved down Rimmer’s body, running on an instinct as old as the species, executing a program he had been waiting to run for longer than he could remember. His hands grasped Rimmer's buttocks as he sank to his knees.

Rimmer let go of Lister’s shoulders and put his hands behind him to break his fall. He let himself lie back and touched Lister's hair with his fingertips, surprised at the wiry texture. Lister, mouth already open in a moan, leaned down towards the bulge in those ridiculously tight trousers. He wanted... He just wanted. An ocean of want rose in him, drowning reason and sense.

Rimmer felt the world tilting, trying to shake him off. He grasped Lister's hair and gasped. Torn between wanting ten thousand different things at the same time, Lister settled for pulling the trousers down, and noting, to his surprise, that there was no underwear. Well, Lister hazily reflected, Legion might have been a lonely guy.

Rimmer shivered again as some parts of him that had not been exposed to the world since his death - and pretty damn infrequently exposed even before then - were abruptly uncovered. He desperately wanted something to happen, wanted it with an ache that threatened to split him in two, but he had no idea what it was. "Please…” he gasped, not knowing what he was asking for, knowing only that he needed it, desperately.

Lister devoured the erection in front of him, only dimly aware of something being said, in a nasal voice made harsh with lust. This... This was new. The part of Lister that was and always would be insatiably curious marveled at the strange, new sensations. The taste, the texture, the smell, the odd fullness in his mouth. It was slightly bitter, just like Rimmer himself. But most of him, the rest of him, was simply lost to a surprisingly vivid pleasure.

Rimmer felt himself enveloped by something warm and slick. Words disappeared, and the world was definitely tipping and sliding him off. He grasped the wiry hair harder, thrusting madly. He was not a man to last long at the best of times. This was far beyond the best of times. The climax was mind-boggling as he thrust himself into something silky and wet, with a few too many teeth, that he vaguely remembered was Lister’s mouth.

This isn't going to last, Lister thought, as the penis in his mouth swelled and pulsed. But he was hungry, oh so hungry!

Rimmer gasped and wheezed with his final thrusts. His head fell back onto the floor with a clonk.

Lister, confused and insatiate, yet oddly content, swallowed. He realized what he had just done, trying to make sense of the emotions swimming around his mind. He put one hand on each side of Rimmer, and tried to breathe normally. But he was still achingly erect. He wished he could remember what you were supposed to do about that.

Rimmer's head started to clear as he stared up at the ceiling. Thoughts rushed in to his brain, jostling with each other. He just had sex with Lister. He just had mind-blowingly good sex with Lister. David Lister. A man who ate his own toenail clippings. His head swam. It didn’t make sense! He raised his head off of the ground, uncertain what to do next. He felt drained. He was not sure he could meet Lister's eyes, but he could feel the man over him, straddling him. Hiking himself onto his elbows, Rimmer looked down at where Lister was crouched over him. There was an almost frightening hunger in Lister's eyes. Stark lust, tinged with a warmer emotion.

Lister tried to gain control of his voice, to breathe normally, to say something appropriate and fitting. No go. Rimmer reached towards him, yanking ineffectively upwards on the first thing his hand encountered, which happened to be an ear. Lister didn’t care; any touch felt good now, or at least a good form of bad. He leaned into the touch, following the movement like a puppy on a leash.

Rimmer was surprised when Lister moved up towards him with such a token tug on his part, and felt a bit like a perverted Moses, able to move with a gesture what was a previously very intractable sea. He tentatively kissed Lister, awkwardly fumbling in the other man's long johns as his head fell back again with another clonk. This, at least, was territory he could work with, as he tried to stroke the other man. Although it felt quite strange to be on the other side of the penis during a hand job.

Lister leaned into the kiss hungrily, following Rimmer’s head down and embracing the hologram. He ground himself against Rimmer's body, aching for release. When he felt Rimmer's hand moving towards his groin, he gasped, trying to move his erection closer to it. Lister soon forgot his own name as Rimmer’s long-fingered hands grasped him and stroked. He teetered on the edge of a climax. He found himself wishing Rimmer were soft light, so the hologram could envelop him completely; he wanted all of him!

Rimmer was startled by how sensual it felt to have Lister gasping in his ear, and to know that he was the one responsible. He stroked faster, more firmly, twiddling the tip with his thumb in the way that he knew _he_ liked it when he... too frequently... did himself.

Rimmer did... something... to Lister, something that seemed to turn his brain inside out. He orgasmed, choking "Arn!" into Rimmer's neck, and felt like... like rain. Like he was home. Like... love.

Rimmer felt Lister spill on him, a sticky mess that he knew would take hours to get out, but he could not bring himself to care. Instead, he pulled out every gasp he could, whatever passed for his simulated heart shuddering as Lister groaned into his shoulder.

Lister realized that he was crying, and he did not know why. Rimmer brought one hand up to Lister's tightly curled hair, not sure what to do about the tears he felt on his simulated skin. He stroked it, slowly. Lister buried his head in that space, that inexplicably safe space, and tried to coax his mind into telling him what he felt. He had always lived by his emotions; he was the only guy he knew who cried at soaps and read trashy romance magazines. And yes, he did cry. But not when he was happy. Never before.

Rimmer lay on the ground, the weight of Lister atop, and felt a striking absence. He felt no snarkiness, no bitterness, no snideness. He was petrified of what was starting to bubble up to take its place. The hand that had been stroking Lister’s hair fell to the floor, and Rimmer tried to grab the floorboards.

Lister moved his head away slightly, and snorted, a little too loudly. He met Rimmer's eyes full on. "Believe me now, do ya?" he gasped.

"I..." Rimmer's mouth was dry. He was still trying to grab the floorboards; the other hand dropped Lister’s now-limp member and also grabbed for the floor. Lister gave Rimmer's cracked, dry lips a soft, quick kiss. Rimmer closed his eyes and shook his head. "Bloody hell..." he croaked. He opened his eyes, and saw Lister staring at him with an unfamiliar softness.

Lister tried to grin confidently, but he was afraid. He knew Rimmer, and everything he knew pointed to the fact that Rimmer would retreat, run away; try to deny everything. Ah, but to be fair, so had Lister. The psi-moon loomed in the landscape of his own mind again, and he bit his tongue to keep from saying something stupid.

Arn wanted nothing more than to run into a corner and try to sort things out. But the solid, heavy lump of flesh on top of him was inescapable. “Lister," he croaked, licking his lips. "We... uh." As if 'uh' was a word that conveyed, eloquently, the totality of what had just happened.

"Yeah?" Lister tried to catch one of Rimmer's errant hands with one of his own. Here it comes, he thought with desperate resignation. Denial.

Rimmer grasped the hand, squeezing it as if to communicate his thoughts via Morse code. Lister felt Rimmer’s hand, and something inside him started beating again. It occurred to him it might have been his heart.

Amid the jumble of thoughts crashing through Rimmer’s head, one finally broke through the confusion and rose above the rest...

Door.

Not letting go of Lister's hand, he turned his head towards the door. It remained closed. Rimmer sighed, a rather weary sigh. "Well.” He grasped for the lack-of-door opening as the only thing that was at all analyzable.

Then, suddenly, there came a voice. A very familiar voice; from outside the door. "Sirs? Sirs? Are you all right?"

Rimmer tried to jump at the sound of what he realized was Kryten, but he was lying down and trapped under Lister, so he settled for shimmying like a fish instead. "Hell!"

Lister kept chewing his own tongue; desperately afraid of losing what – if anything – they had gained here. When Rimmer ran, he ran at full speed, and he didn’t come back. There wouldn’t be a chance like this again.

Rimmer pushed himself into a half-reclined position, his eyes wide, slightly panicky. "Lister! Didn't you hear that?"

"Yeah. Best get our kit on then, hadn't we?" He didn’t feel like himself. He felt like a bad photocopy of himself that someone had crumpled up and thrown in a bin somewhere. Yeah, he was an optimist, but he needed _something_ to go on. Some sign that Rimmer was with him in this. He felt suddenly very alone.

Rimmer looked at Lister’s calm demeanor, aghast. "Do you want to greet that bloody busybody mechanoid with..." he waved his hand at the general lack-of-clothing and presence-of-sperm on them both. He couldn’t believe that the other man didn’t seem panicky about the prospect of being caught in what must be the mother of all compromising positions.

Kryten’s voice drifted through the door. "Sirs? Thank goodness I've found you! The Cat simply refused to help look. I can't hear what you're saying, but I can hear it's you. Hang on; help is on the way!"

“Lister…” Rimmer said, as he felt the other man’s weight lifted off of him.

Lister smiled back at Rimmer, and started looking vaguely around for the remains of his clothing. "Yeah, man?"

Rimmer looked at the door, and looked at Lister. He didn't move from where he lay.

Lister took stock of his clothing. One sleeve had been pulled completely off his overalls. Well. At least it matched his jacket now. He tried to tie it to the rest of the garment, but the result looked unconvincing.

"What's wrong?" Rimmer asked, haltingly. The question seemed ludicrous as soon as it fell out. What wasn't?

Another voice could be heard outside, mumbling something inaudible. Kryten's reply was clear as day. “And you didn't TELL ME?? Oh, for heaven's sake!”

Rimmer looked from the door, where he was starting to get a very bad idea of what was going on, to Lister, who seemed to be pulling away from him in a very unLister-like quiet melancholy.

Weird noises came from without the door, as though someone was moving a bunch of heavy objects.

Lister hesitated, then gave in. What the hell. It had been that kind of a day. He might as well say it straight out. Get it over with, like tearing a scab off of a wound that needed draining. "If you want to forget about this... then that's OK. Just... tell me now, OK? I'll work out something to tell Kryten; he'll believe anything I say. But please... if it meant anything at all... Don't just let it go."

Rimmer's brain grasped at that thought like a starving man who sees a spring roll dangled before him on a fishing line. Forget it all. Back to normal. Whatever passed for his brain applauded. Whatever passed for his heart sent a stab of pain through him, then turned around in a sulk. Rimmer stood up, pulling his slightly sticky and damp velour trousers up and refastening them.

Everything in Lister's body language begged Rimmer to not run away, not this time. "It's lonely in space, mate. Don't make it lonelier." With some effort, Lister managed to gather enough fabric around him to look decent... ish. He straightened his back, pretending he looked even half like something dignified.

Rimmer walked over to where Lister stood, trying to put on a set of clothes that had been barely cohesive even before this afternoon's activities. The hologram bent down with pursed lips and placed the kind of smack that a grade-school teacher would deliver on Lister's full, soft cheek. This caught Lister completely off guard, and he smiled, as by pure reflex.

Rimmer coughed nervously, licked his lips, and turned back to the door. "Er, one thing, though."

"What?"

"Apparently, that was not actually sex." His voice cracked on the last word.

"Oh, right." Lister had forgotten all about the door.

Kryten’s voice filtered through the door. “Don't worry, Sirs, I'm almost there!”

Rimmer looked down at his half-naked, ejaculate-streaked body with alarm. He was in no fit state to make a public appearance. He started poking at the small device on his belt. His pants passed through an array of bright colors. He turned briefly to female, yelped, and pushed that button again to return to male. Lister couldn't help but whistle appreciatively. The female Rimmer had been hot. Rimmer glared at Lister. "No smegging way." Oh, right then, Lister thought, your mind went there! That’s a good thing, my friend. His smile grew wider. Finally, one button gave Rimmer an undershirt and a clean set of blue pants. He released a long-held breath. That was as much experimentation as he was willing to do.

"He'll be here in a sec,” Lister reminded Rimmer, as though he needed reminding. ”What should I tell him?" Come _on_ , Arn, he groaned silently, give us an inch!

"Tell him?" Rimmer's brain waved goodbye and wished him well.

Lister indicated the door, which was now almost, just barely, moving with vibration. Rimmer looked from the door to Lister and back, in panic. "Do you think he'll deactivate my lightbee and toss me out of the garbage chute if you tell him the truth, or will he just bitch at me and make my death more of a hell than it is already?"

Kryten’s voice came through the door again. ”What did you say? Oh? Then why am I using these? Must put them away then...”

Lister considered this. "He'll do what I tell him. He wants me to be happy, even if he thinks it's crazy. He makes me grated onion corn-flakes, fer smegs sake."

Rimmer, not reassured, walked over to where Lister's jacket still lay on the ground. Not thinking, he picked it up and wrapped it around himself.

Well, Lister thought, watching the very jackety looking Arn with something akin to pride. Baby steps.

Rimmer looked at Lister with pleading eyes. _Don't make me decide something that important_ , they said. _I'm Rimmer, for smeg's sake_. Lister’s grin was nearing face-tearing proportions. His eyes said something very eloquent in a language Rimmer felt he should know.

The vibrations in the door stopped, and for a moment, all was quiet. Almost as an anti-climax, the door opened... inwards.

Rimmer looked at Lister, and his jaw fell open.

Lister tried not to think of anything. He was vaguely aware of the Cat's voice in the background, saying: "...And that way, we can just leave 'em in there for as long as we want, and they'll just do whatever they think they need to come out!" There was a very feline screech of laughter.

Rimmer's jaw shut with a snap.

"I wonder if there's really more than one way to skin a cat?” he asked, shrugging his arms into Lister’s jacket. “I’ve always wanted to fully explore that saying."

"Well, Arn, me man, there's only one way to find out..." Lister pulled his studded gloves on more tightly, following Rimmer out of the room with his mouth set grimly.

 

What is love about, after all, but sharing these moments of importance?


End file.
